First SAIS Seminar concludes on November 17, 2025, under the guidance of Prof. Narges Bajoghli
The inaugural SAIS Seminar closed on November 17, 2025, with an invitation to live with complexity. Standing before a room of first-year students, Professor Narges Bajoghli reminded them of the parable that opened the course in its very first week: the blind men and the elephant.
“For the past twelve weeks,” she told the class, “we have been those figures, each of us touching only one part of a massive, shifting creature: our world in transition.”
Throughout the semester, the SAIS Seminar brought in leading experts to guide students through different “parts of the elephant”: the muscle of global trade and markets, the tusks of geopolitics and great power competition, the voice of social movements and resistance, the skeleton of international law and governance, the nervous system of artificial intelligence, the fever of climate change, the spark of entrepreneurship, andthe conscious will of U.S. foreign policy attempting to steer it all.
If that felt disjointed, Prof. Bajoghli suggested, it was by design.
“The world presents itself as disjointed,” she said. “Our task at SAIS is not just to be expert feelers of these different parts. It’s to synthesize, to step back, and attempt to see the whole elephant.”
In her closing lecture, Prof. Bajoghli argued that despite the diversity of weekly topics, the seminar had been circling three fundamental interlocking struggles shaping the current era.
Three Struggles Defining a World in Transition
First, she pointed to the unraveling of the post–Cold War liberal international order, the “operating system” that has structured global politics for decades. From week to week, students saw this crisis from different angles: the challenge to U.S. primacy and the rise of alternative powers in the geopolitics session, the questioning of the foundations of international law and global governance, and the whiplash of U.S. foreign policy across administrations, as described by Dean James Steinberg, revealing a core actor struggling to define its role. Foundational theories from scholars such as Kenneth Waltz and Immanuel Wallerstein, introduced at the start of the semester, were presented as tools to help students situate today’s turbulence within broader historical and structural shifts.
The second struggle centers on the rise of transnational, non-state forces, technological, environmental, and social, that defy traditional borders and institutions. Artificial intelligence, as discussed in the week on emerging technologies, does not respect national boundaries and is “rewriting the rules of security, economics, and even consciousness.” Climate change, the seminar emphasized, is the ultimate transnational stressor, forcing every state to rethink its economic and security calculus. Social movements and digital activism, meanwhile, are reshaping political realities from below. These movements, often networked globally and amplified online, “bypass traditional diplomacy” while creating new forms of vulnerability and new opportunities for change. These forces also collide with global markets: in the week on trade, students examined how AI, climate pressures, and policy shifts are disrupting labor, supply chains, and economic models worldwide.
The third struggle is less visible but, in Prof. Bajoghli’s telling, just as decisive: the contest over who gets to define reality. “In a time of uncertainty,” she noted, “the power to define the problem, to name the crisis, and to articulate a vision of the future is a primary form of power.” From geopolitical theory, such as Fukuyama’s “End of History” versus Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations,” to disaster narratives and the construction of “the West and the rest,” the seminar repeatedly emphasized that stories do not merely describe the world; they help shape it. Social movements, students were reminded, are fundamentally about storytelling too: efforts to change the story about justice, rights, and power. Even the students’ own reflective assignments, in which they narrated what “worlds in transition” meant to them, were framed as an exercise in claiming narrative agency.
Building the SAIS Toolkit
If the world is an elephant and the seminar weeks were its disparate parts, the final session focused on what Prof. Bajoghli called the “SAIS toolkit”: the skills and habits of mind required to become not just specialists, but synthesizers.
She outlined four core components:
- Theoretical lenses. The world-systems theories and structural frameworks presented in the early weeks were viewed as instruments for discerning “deep structures and long historical cycles,” rather than isolated events.
- Methodological pluralism. Students are expected to think like economists, historians, ethnographers, and legal scholars in turn—moving between models, archives, fieldwork, and legal texts. No single method, they were told, is sufficient on its own.
- Critical discourse analysis. The ability to “read power” in speeches, policies, and news articles—asking who benefits from a particular story and why it resonates—was presented as essential for any future policymaker.
- The courage to scenario plan. The final project, a scenario-planning exercise, pushed students to move from analysis to imagination, mapping multiple possible futures and the choices that might lead to them.
The tragedy of the blind men and the elephant, Prof. Bajoghli reminded students, is not their blindness but their certainty. “The tragedy is that they stop at their own limited perceptions and argue, convinced that their partial truth is the whole.”
“You Are the Adults in the Room Now”
Perhaps the most striking theme of the closing session was the rejection of the idea that somewhere, out there, is a class of experts who already have the answers.
“There are no adults in the room who understand it all,” Prof. Bajoghli told the students. “You are the adults in the room now.”
The confusion and discomfort many felt throughout the semester, she suggested, was not a pedagogical flaw but a realistic reflection of the world they are preparing to enter. No one, including the experts who visited the seminar, possesses a single, definitive map of where the global system is headed.
Instead, students were encouraged to cultivate what she called “promiscuous reading”: an intellectual openness to diverse methods, ideologies, and perspectives, and a willingness to listen across “the wide spectrum of expertise, frameworks, and opinions about what is going on.”
The work ahead, she emphasized, is collective and generational: to grapple across differences, synthesize fragmented knowledge, and contribute to building “a world in which our children and grandchildren can live.”
A Beginning, Not an End
Prof. Bajoghli positioned this first iteration not as a finished product, but as the start of an evolving experiment in how SAIS trains future policymakers.
“You’re no longer first-year students who are simply feeling a single part,” she said in closing. “The world in transition doesn’t need experts who only understand their own corner of the beast. It needs synthesizers, translators, and builders who can see the elephant as a whole.”
The future of policymaking belongs not to those who cling to a single piece of the beast, but to those willing to do the hard, humble work of synthesis: listening across disciplines and disagreements, and helping to shape a world that does not yet exist, that urgently needs you.